Smacking children: Tony Abbott, you're just too gentle
|
Version 0 of 1. Oh, the disappointment. Just when it seemed we had a prime minister willing to toughen Australia up again, Tony Abbott comes out with a namby-pamby recommendation for “gentle smacks” on children. The terrible irony is that in the same interview, Abbott even notes the danger of “political correctness taken to extremes”. And he’s right – that’s why we as a nation opted for a politically incorrect prime minister. And until now he’d lived up to his promise, being incorrect – politically – on all sorts of issues. We thought we could trust the prime minister to be politically incorrect almost to the point of political dementia. But apparently not, not now that he has decided that “gentle smacks” are the way for parents to go. As a parent myself, I know very well that gentleness gets you nowhere with children. My mother used to have a saying – “I am going to kick you right in the neck” – and I think it’s as true today as it ever was. Kids will never learn the difference between right and wrong via gentleness: their brains are too small and malformed. The only way to get the message through to a child is to hit them so hard that the terrifying memory of your brutality rises like fire in their mind every time they even consider stepping out of line. You don’t have to take my word for it – all parenting experts agree that hurting your children is a bad idea, and we all know what idiots experts are. But it’s not just Australian children Abbott is hurting by his reckless insistence on not hurting Australian children. No, this is all about the message he’s sending to the rest of society: the message that misbehaviour can be corrected “gently”. Think about the consequences of such an approach, for example, on border protection. Are we to assume that Abbott will be recommending only “gentle human rights abuses” being inflicted on refugees by our government? That’s not going to stop people getting on boats! We all know that you’ve got to be cruel to be kind – however will we save those poor souls from a watery grave if we don’t, figuratively, smack them as hard as possible? Do we really want our asylum seekers to end up as stroppy and disrespectful of authority as the mollycoddled Abbott daughters? Hopefully not. It’s mixed messages, you see. This government has hitherto had a clear and unambiguous policy of punishing everyone it can as harshly as possible: refugees, child care workers, public schools. Yet now we see the prime minister himself prescribing “gentle” punishments. Where’s the consistency? And where will it end? Today he’s saying you should smack children but nonetheless "shouldn’t hurt" them, tomorrow he might be saying that you should allow the unemployed to live above the poverty line, or that you should try to avoid torturing livestock. A slippery slope, you see. Abbott says, “I think that we’ve got to treat our kids well”. I say that as Australians, we need to get together and tell him: that’s not the kind of prime minister we voted for. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |